Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Mac community is buzzing about the new features forethcoming in Leopard. Since the Leopard Preview at the WWDC earlier this year, the rumor mill has been working overtime on speculation about what secret new features Apple would add. There are a lot of theories. Some good. Some bad. Some just plain ridiculous.

Here are the two that are on the top of my wish list:

Full NTFS SupportTime to face facts, Macs are in the minority. They may be "cool", they may be "hip", they may get all the press, but they're still on the outside looking in. It's still a Windows world, and the Mac is just living in it.

It's time to fit in better. Every Mac needs to be able to read and write to an NTFS drive. Every corporation uses NTFS. Most home computers now use NTFS. If you're going to network with PCs, and maybe even have Windows running on a Mac, OSX needs to be able to write to NTFS. Period.

True Windows VirtualizationSee my comment above about it being a Windows world. Like it or not, you still can't get a Mac version every program out there. A few key packages are still Windows Only, and until that changes, Mac users need a rock-solid way to be able to run them and still keep using OSX.

The past year has seen huge advances in this area. We now have Boot Camp to allow us to dual boot between OSX and XP. We also have Parallels to let us run Windows inside OSX, and VMWare Fusion on the horizon. This is all good news, and light years ahead of where we used to be. Now I want more.

What I want is WINE on Steriods. CrossOver Extreme Edition. The Holy Grail. I want to be able to click on a Windows EXE and be able to run it on OSX.

Imagine a port of the WIN32 API built right into OSX. An interface between a Windows Application and the Mac OS. A way to allow every windows program to run on a Mac -- right out of the box. Every office application. Every accounting package. Every game. Everything.

The folks on the WINE project have come close. The folks at Apple can make it a reality. There has already been speculation that Microsoft might have even given Apple the source code for the Win32 API -- making this a much easier.

Granted, they're not "sexy", but these two changes alone make the Mac a much, much more compelling platform for anyone tempted to make the "Switch":

"No more viruses? No more malware? And I can still run that archane in-house, windows-only app I need for work? Sign me up!"

Check back here after the Leopard release to find out if I'm on the mark or off my rocker!